NEUROSCIENCE RESEARCH LABORATORY
WITS NeuRL
MACHINE LEARNING and AI
BSc, BScHons (Computer Science), BScHons (Applied Mathematics), MSc (Artificial Intelligence), PhD (Informatics)
DIVISION LEADER
Prof Benjamin Rosman
Benjamin Rosman is a Professor in the School of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, where he runs the Robotics, Autonomous Intelligence and Learning (RAIL) Laboratory and is the Director of the National E-Science Postgraduate Teaching and Training Platform (NEPTTP). He is also the Chief Science Officer of Lelapa AI, building AI for Africans, by Africans.
He received his Ph.D. in Informatics in 2014, and previously obtained his M.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence, both from the University of Edinburgh. He also has a B.Sc. (Hons) in Computer Science and a B.Sc. (Hons) in Applied Mathematics, both from the University of the Witwatersrand. His research interests focus primarily on reinforcement learning and decision making in autonomous systems, specifically on how learning can be accelerated through abstracting and generalising knowledge gained from solving related problems.
He was a founder of the Deep Learning Indaba machine learning summer school, with a focus on strengthening African machine learning, which now has satellite events in 47 African countries. He was made a 2022 CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, in Learning in Machines and Brains, was a 2017 recipient of a Google Faculty Research Award in machine learning, and a 2021 recipient of a Google Africa Research Award. In 2020, he was made a Senior Member of the IEEE.
RESEARCH
Machine Learning, Robotics and AI
Professor Rosman's research interests are broudly in the areas of reinforcement learning, artificial intelligence, machine learning, autonomous decision making, robotics
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Devon Jarvis
Devon Jarvis is a Lecturer in the School of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) and director of the Cognition, Adaptation and Learning (CAandL) research lab. He completed his PhD in Computational Neuroscience at Wits with Benjamin Rosman, Richard Klein, and Andrew Saxe. He was previously a visiting researcher at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit and Sainsbury Wellcome Centre at UCL via a Commonwealth Scholarship and received support from the Google PhD Fellowship mentored by Gamaleldin Elsayed. In 2025, he was named one of the Mail & Guardian's 200 Young South Africans.
BSc, BScHons (Computer Science & Economic Science),
MSc (Computer Science),
PhD (Computational Neuroscience)
RESEARCH
Machine Learning, Robotics and AI
Dr Jarvis' research focuses on understanding the meso-scale structure of the brain and how these structures function computationally and algorithmically to learn high-level concepts from low-level sensory inputs. He investigates how these concepts afford the brain the ability to systematically generalise, perform context-sensitive controlled semantic cognition, and support goal-oriented decision-making. Through supervision in the CAandL Lab, he works broadly on theoretical (cognitive and systems) neuroscience, computational linguistics, and machine learning.